Detour
by emerald1198
Summary: Neither Jake Martin nor Katie Matlin is particularly good at saying the right thing, but when they're together, talking gets just a little bit easier. One-shot.


**My initial reaction to Jatie was rather indifferent. I like Katie as a character, though I'm still a little confused as to where the writers are trying to take her, and Jake, well – what do we even know about the kid? I've read the descriptions for Season 12 – and I won't spoil them for anyone who doesn't want to know – but I will say that one of the storylines confirmed a theory about Jake Martin that I've had for awhile now, and that is that he has simple goals in life.**

** Katie, as we know, didn't depart on the best note last season, what with her drug addiction and all. I'm really not entirely sure what her attitude involving her future will be when she returns. For all we know, it could be to turn everything around and take on the world (if, of course, she doesn't get too distracted by her desire to make Drew Torres's life hell). At any rate, I had to make a few presumptions there.**

** I do think Jatie could be a very interesting couple if the writer's take them in a good direction. Anyway, I decided to write a one-shot for them. I'm not sure I _love_ it; I sort of worked on and off for weeks – but hopefully, it's decent.**

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The night it all happens, there is a steady drizzle that drags out the whole school day. Clouds linger close to the ground. Teachers talk louder, and students listen less. She falls asleep during study hall – right in the middle of Owen's "big-win-last-night" rave – and he chuckles when she jolts awake. Katie apologizes, and he just laughs some more.

She still thinks he may have taken it to heart.

Spring Formal Committee is already herding together their members for this year's event. Katie wants to tell the new freshman, with their neon banners and untamed enthusiasm, to chew on some of the icicles that still reach down from the school's arch.

Instead, she lets Tori – a bright-eyed new cheerleader stuck in perpetual Spirit Mode – drag her by her fingertips to the first meeting. Katie's known Mar her whole life, and never is she one to lose the spark in her eyes – but, my God, when Katie slumps into the bustling room of tearing paper, pass-the-time chatter, and squeaking chalk, her best friend has already passed the "about-to-combust-in-frustration" stage and is now just staring blankly into space with, oh, so tired eyes.

Mo sits in the corner pawing through a bag of Doritos.

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Jake Martin turns into the room at the half-way mark. Wood-shavings cloud onto his jacket, and above his brow, beads of sweat glisten. She can see the room's giddy atmosphere first settle onto him; he blinks a few times, claps the sawdust from his palms, and exhales heavily.

On his way to the opposite side of the room, he stumbles over the ankles of a long-legged girl and soon after leaves a scuffmark on another student's poster – which results in at least three fierce scowls directed his way.

This is the first time Katie's lips even twitch all night.

It's Tristan Milligan who has called on him. The ginger-haired boy rudely maneuvers his way through huddles of other members sprawled over the floor, and he slaps a sketch into Jake's hands. It's for the wooden flower sculpture, Katie presumes.

Jake's eyes narrow for an innocent moment as he observes the guideline – and ascend incredulously in the next moment. "You have to be joking, right?" He scoffs.

Tristan's eyes spark. If nothing else, it's this fiery kind of pride that connects the freckle-faced boy to his older brother. "If you have a better idea, Lumberjack, I'm all ears."

Jake snorts, and jabs a finger into the wrinkled paper. "Believe me, if I could actually pull this off, I would – but since our school doesn't carry Dremel MM450B saw blades, you might want to dumb that design down a bit."

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Never in her life has she ever been more thankful for the shuttle buses. Last year, the school considered eliminating them; few students favored a dark, rickety ride home over a breezy walk through safe suburban neighborhoods. But a five-foot freshman boy with two large front teeth and an oddly angular nose, which he was always wrinkling, convinced his parents to attend a public school board meeting and put up a case against the removal.

And while the school funds may be wasted now on gasoline that fuels the escorts of Gameboy playing, exercised-deprived morons, one good thing – that Katie used to consider a downside – that comes from the five-thirty buses is that all after school activities must be dismissed the moment they pull up. No few-more-minutes or but-we're-so-close's.

The rain is a fresh awakening when she makes a numb, dazed escape from the school. It's no cure, nor does it make up for those two dragging hours – but it's a start. Her phone vibrates in her sweatshirt pocket, and when she puts the other line to her ear, Marisol's voice is low and raspy. "Sorry Katie," she breathes somewhere far away from the curb she ought to be next to, "I can't give you a ride home tonight. Mo had a" – giggle – "surprise for me."

"Mar" – she protests.

But her friend is already providing her with a list of possibilities. "Clare Edwards stays after for the newspaper; you made nice with her, right?" – _No_ – "Or Owen has basketball – wait, no. He rides with Drew, doesn't he? There's that girl who smokes under the stairway. Find out if she lives near you."

"Seriously, Mar?"

"You'll be fine. You know I wouldn't complain if our roles were reversed – you know, if you and Drew hadn't" –

"Bye, Mar."

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"You know, the fables lied with the whole 'slow and steady wins the race' thing," she mumbles into the passenger window.

Jake Martin drives too well for a teenage boy, so much that Katie finds it to be almost uncanny. The weather, granted, has taken a turn for the worst in the past few hours – a fast-paced, icy rain with mist that clouds into an archway in front of them and streams that send lightning-colored flashes up the night street.

When the boy beside her chuckles, his eyes do not avert themselves from the tear-streaked road. It's a low, masculine sound that goes well with the darkness. "This is no night for drag-racing, Kate."

"It's _Katie_," she hisses.

Without removing his hand from the wheel, he sucks his shoulders in, his eyes widening and his mouth opening in protest. "Sorry, sorry. I used to have a cousin named Kate; you know, you really remind me of her."

"How so?"

Jake smirks, biting his lip. "Oh, you know. Amber hair, blue eyes – irritable, uptight attitude."

Katie huffs and wracks her brain for some sort of comeback; there was a time when she wasn't half-bad with them, but nowadays, she stutters and trips with her words. She can't remember the last time she said precisely the right thing.

In the end, she settles on throwing him a half-playful, half-serious punch to the shoulder. To her, it feels strange the moment she does it – awkward and foolish. Like offering a distasteful joke to a stranger.

But Jake takes it good-heartedly. He has an easy smile – a shadow that dances off the windows. And inside the dulled red of a truck suspended high off the ground, the night is soft and still with a cadence that lulls her to sleep.

Jake Martin, she guesses – and holds on to this wager – is not one to wake a sleeping girl.

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In the end, Katie Matlin is right.

Jake Martin's gentle touch on her shoulder is not what brings her back. Instead, it is the sudden jolt underneath her and the sting of the skull just above her temple thwacking into the window that pulls her sharply from a world meant to be eased out of.

Oddly enough, it is the shuttle buses that first appear in her conscious mind – their rocking and jerking over a road that is paved at least twice a year. The glow of the radio and illuminated road ahead are the screens of the Gameboys.

In the lens of the windshield, there is a scene lit by fire it seems. Golden and blurry like the heat rays of a flame. Ironically enough, the ice has yet to let up. Rather a perfect paradox in the making – beautiful if only it is not shattered by the flood of sense that arrives after a dream. The car is surrounded by trees, real, wild trees that you don't see in the city parks, and she's not sure where they end or where the night sky begins – or if that's even the same place out here.

Jake Martin is a ghost beside her. His lips are colored black like the rest of their surroundings, but the rest of him is all shadow.

"Where are we?" She asks him, and her voice is impossibly loud in this circle of silence, surreal, too – and when it is gone and Jake has yet to answer, she starts to forget, starts to question if her voice had been real moments ago.

"The Himalayas," chuckles his dark lips.

She is too drowsy for his flippancies or to scowl at them. _"Jake,"_ she hisses once.

"Relax," he pacifies, sarcasm washed down, "It's a back road I know – loops right around the outskirts of the city. You'll be back under your twinkling billboards and skyscraper real soon." The last sentence plays off his tongue with quiet bitterness.

"Why not just cut downtown?"

"The traffic," he murmurs, "I don't want to drive in the city with the weather anyway."

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She has a black belt in karate, but Katie Matlin didn't train like she would ever need it. She was a quick, graceful learner, and she knows how to break a wooden plank with her bare foot – but she didn't train to learn.

She doesn't train for real things.

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He doesn't drive downtown – not in storms and not in sunlight.

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With Jake Martin, silence is natural, and with Katie, it's flimsy, awkward, and heavy. And if a stranger was to join them in the truck on this rainy night, Katie's not sure what in the world he or she would feel. A contradiction of epic proportions, she's sure – two atmospheres dueling it out.

(The real difference between them, however, is that Jake is good with words when he wants to be.)

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At the dawn of her awakening, she was constantly slipping her hand into her pocket to ensure that her cell phone was still there, still groping the side of her purse for the cylinder shape – just in case.

Now, her eyelids droop, and her purse has slipped to the ground, locked between her ankles.

The ghost beside her keeps driving.

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It is seven – an hour past the sunset – when Jake's grand, red truck takes its last jolt. Her yelp is an octave sleepier than her normal voice.

It's a broken beer bottle that does it in, chipped and shattered under the right hind tire. Jake curses under his breath, low and disappointed – but seemingly collected. When he calls the tow-truck and his father with composure, Katie loses her own.

"Damnit, Jake!" She screeches, and she kicks a rock on the side of the road for no real reason, "You couldn't just drive through the city? I have barely any bars of service out here, and my parents are probably freaking out right now; plus, I have two reports due tomorrow! I don't have time for" –

"_Shut up_, Katie!"

Her jaw clenches, making for an uneven whoosh of breath. Why Jake's harsh silencing takes her by surprise, she can't be sure.

In the moments following it, Jake studies her with careful eyes. They are both out of the car now, Jake beside the damaged tire and Katie leaning against the right side of the hood with crossed arms and pursed lips. The rain has let up for now, but Katie guesses it is a momentary break in the storm. Jake approaches her slowly with an apologetic glint to his eyes, but in the end, he doesn't speak a word to her. Just sits with her – and swaps a mosquito away from her shoulder.

"Thanks," she mutters, and the stubborn side of her considers saying the word begrudgingly, but it comes out before she can contemplate – soft and indifferent.

"No problem."

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"How come you don't talk a lot?"

Katie kicks a pebble mixed in the backcountry gravel to the side of the road and strums her fingers over the hood.

Beside her, Jake smirks straight ahead at the trees for a moment before looking down. "What makes you think I don't?"

She shrugs. In theory, he's right to point this out; she really has no valid examples – it's not as if she and he are, by any means, friends. A ride between two practical strangers is expected to be silent, she supposes. And yet – "Because you're too good at being quiet."

He quirks his neck, and she amends her explanation. "It doesn't faze you, the silence," she murmurs and then retracts to be fair, "I guess I can't know that for sure."

Another thing Katie has never done well with is eye contact – when to give it, when to reserve it, and how long to hold it. The strange look Jake is giving her now makes her feels rigid, nervous to meet it – yet quivering under it.

"You're right," he finally mutters, his voice low and cracking a few times.

There's a dragging moment of heavy silence that contradicts her former observation. Surely, Jake Martin is feeling, at the very least, a tad uneasy now.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why don't you talk more? Especially when you're so damn good at it." The grudge that never came earlier surfaces now when she doesn't want it to.

Jake chuckles, but besides that, says nothing else.

Suddenly, she's frustrated, and she's not sure why. "No, really," she edges, whirling to look at him, "You're smart and witty – and I heard how you talked to Tristan today." – a grin pulls at Jake's lips – "So why not be like that all the time?"

She hopes he understands that if he tries to downplay his charisma right now, she will, in no way, appreciate it. And whether he's seen that in her eyes or not, it isn't modesty to cloud his features in the next moment.

"Because people don't care what I have to say." And the words aren't resentful or penitent; they're merely as-a-matter-of-fact, the way he says them.

"That's not true."

"Katie," he looks her directly in the eyes, "it is."

She's mad now, and it isn't just Jake – it's her, too. "Do you have any idea how hard I've tried to be good at talking?" She demands, her eyes suddenly burning with unidentified tears, "But I just – I'm not – I can't – I never know what the right thing is to say. I'm not good at making people laugh – and, hell, silence is just as awkward for me. You have no idea how much I wish I could be like you!"

Much to her chagrin, the boy only laughs humorlessly, shaking his head in a sad rhythm. "You don't know what you're talking about," he murmurs.

"And that's my problem!"

He snorts bitterly and turns to her with exasperated eyes. "You're Katie Matlin. You're the class president, the soccer captain – it doesn't _matter_ what you say! It's always going to be right."

Those are the words that distort her image of him in an instant. People like Jake Martin were supposed to be observant, empathetic – but he's just as clueless as anyone. "That's where you're wrong," she breathes.

He laughs again, a sardonic edge playing at his lips. "What did you want me to say, Katie? That you're not as perfect as everyone thinks? That you've got it all and yet you're unhappy? Which cliché's it going to be?"

"You don't know the first thing about me!" She hisses.

And then wrenches open the passenger door.

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The rain picks up again, and Jake Martin remains leaning against the hood. It isn't long before he appears to be soaked through and through, his hair spiking down his forehead and his drooped shoulders dripping water. She's not sure if he stays there out of pride or something else.

Watching him from inside the truck, she has her soft moments and her fiery ones. A few times, she almost rolls the window down and calls to him, but every time, her anger sparks just before she acts – and if _Katie Matlin's words are always right_, then he'll have no problem with her saying nothing at all.

It isn't for nearly ten minutes of the most recent wave of the torrential downpour that Jake finally heaves his shoulders, circles the truck, and climbs into the driver's seat beside her.

"The tow-truck should be here any minute now," he mutters, his voice almost inaudible over the storm.

"Fine." She watches torrents of water strike the ground and pool into streams on the side of the road.

He huffs. "Katie . . ." Jake trails off, and just when she is about to avert her attention back to the window, he starts up again. "That – I mean, what I said – it wasn't – I shouldn't have" –

"Do my ears deceive me?" She snaps sardonically, "Is Jake Martin actually struggling for words?"

He's silent for a dragging moment, long enough for the heat to wear away and a sour feeling to tingle in Katie's stomach. "I might be good with the jokes, but seriousness is another matter," he finally murmurs so low that she's unsure she's heard him correctly. "Clare would know."

"You mean you're ex?" She almost tags on "sister," but the last thing she wants to do now is strike a chord on _that _topic.

He chuckles rather dryly. "She wanted me to 'open up' to her, to talk to her about stuff, and she got mad when I didn't."

"Well, did you tell her how you felt about her?"

"Yeah," he breaks in almost defensively, "I mean . . . I thought I did. I told her that I was in love with her."

Katie clicks her tongue. She's heard that before. When Drew said those words to her, they were hollow. "Did you tell her why you loved her?"

He sighs and gazes out of the driver's window. "She asked me that once," he mutters, "and do you know what I said?"

Katie softens.

"I said that she was _cool."_

"You didn't really love her . . ." Katie trails off, the words sounding more like a statement than the question she'd intended.

"I did," Jake objects, "I did. She was smarter than I'll ever be, but she _listened_ to me, you know?" – His voice softens – "I just wish I had more things to say."

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The truth about Jake Martin:

He's good at snorting and smirking and rolling his eyes, he has a dead mother that he doesn't talk about – not because he doesn't trust anyone or because it hurts to think about her; but because there's merely nothing left to say – and he doesn't want a whole lot in life.

Sometimes, he likes to smile.

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The radio is all static now. There must be a station that reaches out here; they're not _that_ far away from civilization (unless, of course, Jake wasn't lying about the Himalayas). He turns it on at exactly eight o'clock, and Katie waits for him to surf the airwaves for a suitable line – but he just leans back and closes his eyes.

Everything is slow and soft again, and she might be able to sleep if it isn't for that nagging voice whispering in her ear. Jake's words are like the static, repeating over and over, never changing.

"You know, it's not true, what you said."

"Hm?" Jake opens only the eye that faces her, arching his eyebrow – and it makes her feel like she's dealing with his flippant side again. A frozen kind of wink.

She clarifies anyway. "I don't say the right thing all of the time."

He shrugs, "Maybe not, but because you are who you are, no one really cares."

His eyes are closed again as if this is that simple to him, but she can't let it go. Not this time. Her lips press into a straight line before she speaks. "I don't say the right things to my sister," she whispers, and from the corner of her eye, she sees that that sparks a reaction from Jake. A quirk to his jaw, a blink of his eyes.

"I told her to go after a boy she liked, despite the rumors about him. I told her that if I had listened to the ones about Drew, we would never have been that happy together."

Jake inhales rather unevenly and finally opens his shadowy eyes, turning to her.

"But I guess I spoke too soon."

"Katie" –

"And I never say the right things around Marisol," she continues, her breath shaky and her throat sore with rising sobs, "I try to add to her conversations, but lately all she does is give me this condescending look – like I'm doing it all wrong."

"Katie" –

There are hot, salty tears streaming down her face now. "And whatever I said to Drew – it wasn't – I couldn't – I just don't what I did wrong – it's like, no matter what I did, it was never good enough! But Bianca – Bianca _DeSousa _– does something I can't?

"And, God, look at me; I can't even talk to _you_ now!"

Those words leave both teenagers in the car shaken and baffled and a little bit warm inside. All Katie can think is _since when did it become easy to talk to Jake Martin?_

Is it merely the surrealism of the night, the steady rhythm of the rain that forms a lullaby? The fact that both kids feel as if they've been half-asleep all night? Does it make their words feel less real, less risky?

Maybe so, Katie decides.

And then she thinks that perhaps that lullaby follows Jake Martin everywhere.

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The truth about Katie Matlin:

She can kick a soccer ball three quarters of the way down a field, she likes things done her way – if she could, she would do all of it herself, not only because she's afraid of trusting others not to make mistakes, but because sometimes, she's not so sure she likes people in general – and she wanted to be the first female president when she was seven.

Nowadays, all she really wants is to get far away from here. She can't decide if this means she wants the world – or nothing at all.

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When lights flood the car from behind them, Jake Martin has a warm, saw-dusty hand placed over Katie Matlin's, and the girl's tears are as dry as they are going to get, as dry as they ever have been.

Jake and his father wait with the truck, and Helen Martin and Clare Edwards take Katie home. They backtrack and cut through the city; apparently, it is still quicker than continuing with Jake's little detour. Clare grumbles things that fade in and out of coherency when the drive home first starts.

"Jake and his . . . middle of nowhere . . . _thinking?"_

All Helen giggles is, "If I didn't know any better Katie, I'd think he was looking to spend as much as time as possible on that ride home with you."

Clare huffs louder than necessary.

And suddenly, none of Katie's past differences with the junior in the seat in front of her seem to matter, because all she can think about saying is, _"He thought you were so much more than 'cool,' Clare."_

Something stops her, though – and, in the end, it's not that Helen is here or that she's not ready to make nice with Clare. It's that she can't stop thinking about Jake Martin's dark lips.

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When the night ends, two teenagers are thawing back into reality – where there is no icy rain or forests lit by fire. They think hard about the other; one traces the woodwork of his bed's headboard and the other thwacks a soccer ball off the ceiling. But in the end, everything that's happened between them is foggy, almost dream-like.

Jake Martin hopes that Katie Matlin will not slip her poker face on and remount. And Katie Matlin hopes that Jake Martin will not shape his eyebrows into permanent sarcasm and readopt "cool" as his favorite adjective.

For both of them, though, there is a warmth. In her mind, Katie reinvents his easy smile and the way shadows danced across Jake's face, and Jake chuckles at the thought of her crossed arms and pursed lips and weak little "thank you."

Katie falls asleep ready to say the right thing.

Jake falls asleep having something real to say.

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** So, there you have it. Thanks to anyone who took the time to read, and reviews are greatly appreciated.**


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